Education as a Necessity of Life 7

thing of another's experience in order to tell him intelligently
of one's own experience. All communication is like art.
It may fairly be said, therefore, that any, social arrangement
that remains vitally .social, or vitally shared, is educative to
those who participate in it. Only when it becomes cast in
a mold and runs in a routine way does it lose its educative
power.

In final account, then, not only does social life demand
teaching and learning for its own permanence, but the very
process of living together educates. It enlarges and en-
lightens experience; it stimulates and enriches imagina-
tion; it creates responsibility for accuracy and vividness of
statement and thought. A man really living alone (alone
mentally as well as physically) would have little or no occa-
sion to reflect upon his past experience to extract its net
meaning. The inequality of achievement between the mature
and the immature not only necessitates teaching the young,
but the necessity of this teaching gives an immense stimulus
to reducing experience to that order and form which will
render it most easily communicable and hence most usable.

3. The Place of Formal Education. — There is, accordingly,
a marked difference between the education which every one
gets from living with others, as long as he really lives instead
"of just continuing to subsist, and the "deliberate educating of
the young. In the former case the_education is incidental;
it js'ifa^uxalimd jnjxiprtajgl, kyt it is not the express reasonof
the association. While it may be said, without exaggeration,
that the measure of the worth of any social institution,
economic, domestic, political, legal, religious, is its effect in
enlarging and improving experience; yet this effect is not a
part of its original motive, which is limited and more imme-
diately practical. Religious associations began, for example,
in the desire to secure the favor of overruling powers and to
ward off evil influences; family life in the desire to gratify
appetites and secure family perpetuity; systematic labor, for